Holland – Day 2
Museum and Cruise – April 13
Even though we are probably still a little bit jet lagged, we pushed through it and woke up around 7:00 in the morning with a positive outlook on the day. The hotel room is extremely warm, and I was sweating throughout the night – I guess tonight I will have to either avoid the blankets or wear something more conducive to the heat. As the morning approached, the sun pierced through our seventh floor curtains and brightened the room. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, and it didn’t seem all that cold when walking out onto our balcony. The plan for today was to visit the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum, as well as take a canal cruise around the city. After that, we had nothing truly planned.
We headed out at around 8:15 to find some place to have a pancake breakfast. In finding that most of the pancake houses were closed, we learned that in Holland, people eat pancakes for lunch and dinner instead of breakfast! Instead, we ate croissants and muffins at a little shop right by the Rijksmuseum. The museum opens right at 9:00, and we were one of the first to get there today! They were also celebrating some sort of anniversary – I think it has to do with their new renovations, which I must say are beautiful – and handed out cakes for the visitors. Mom and Malka took some, but I was pleasantly stuffed from my chocolate croissant breakfast. There were no lines whatsoever to enter the museum, and we walked right in.
The museum is probably most known for its collection of famous Dutch paintings by the likes of Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals. We did spend some time in that wing, taking pictures with Rembrandt’s Nightwatch, and looking at Vermeer’s genre scenes of women by windows, but I took the lead – to the dismay of my fellow travelers – and dragged us through various exhibits that I wanted to take a look at. First on my list was a special exhibit on display in the Amsterdam Period Room – Daan Roosegaarde’s Lotus Dome. I had seen a picture of the piece in the airplane’s Sky Mall magazine, and had thought it was pretty cool. It was a giant ball covered in heat sensitive foil, and when its internal light shined brightly, the foil would curl up due to the heat and create flower-like patterns.
To get to this exhibit, though, it took a long time and a lot of faulty navigation. The museum is separated by a central “plaza,” and the only way to get across (it seems) is to venture all the way to the second floor and cross over. It took us many tries until we were finally successful in crossing the museum! On the way, we saw some other cool pieces in the collection. On April 30, 2013, the Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands resigned from her thrown and gave it to her son, Willem-Alexander. A national competition was held for artists to conceive of an official portrait for the new king, and the museum had several of the entries on display. Of the three finalists, I knew one – Rineke Dijkstra – a photographer I had learned about in my first Macaulay seminar – Arts in New York City. I was never a fan of her work, though, and didn’t think her portrait was compelling enough to be official. The other finalists were Iris van Dongen and Femmy Otten, the latter being the winner of the competition. I find it kind of interesting that the winner and the two runner-ups are all women!
We visited the jewelry and fashion room on Floor 0, as well as the small Art Nouveau collection on the third floor. Of
all the art I saw today, though, I found one artist in particular that I liked the best – Jan Toorop. Working around the same time as Aubrey Beardsley, a British Decadent artist that I have been reading about for an art history paper, his work is very fluid with organic lines and creepy scenes with grotesque figures.
After ambling around the gardens surrounding the museum, posing for a picture in a really cool fountain, and walking through a labyrinth that my mother thought was a maze and then got bored of and cheated and walked out of (yup, that’s not a good sentence, but I’m keeping it there!), the plan was to go to the Van Gogh Museum, but the line was crazy long! We’re going to have to get there early in the morning tomorrow to avoid the wait. Malka was freezing because she refused to bring a warm coat on our morning excursion, so we decided to take a tram to the flower market and walk our way back to our hotel for a quick pit stop. The stalls at the flower market are actually floating on the canal! There are so many flowers and seeds and bulbs to choose from to plant in your garden. It was getting to be lunchtime, and since the Dutch eat pancakes for lunch and dinner, I thought it’d be a good idea to try to be like them! 
I was a bit disappointed with the experience, but I should have expected it. The pancakes were more like crepes, and Malka wanted a banana one, so I had to have a plain pancake/crepe all to myself! Mom wasn’t too happy when I only ate half of it – not because I didn’t like it, but because I was so stuffed only after half! We also visited some shops on the way back to our room, and I found an awesome hammock store. If only they didn’t weigh so much and take up so much space, I would surely take one home for my dad!
We didn’t spend much time in the hotel when we got back. Our plan following the retrieval of Malka’s coat was to take the tram to Central Station and catch a canal cruise around the city. I was exhausted at this point, and I welcomed the fifty minutes (or so) relaxation that the boat brought. One thing that I forgot to mention in my first day’s post was that Amsterdam is covered in canals, something I didn’t know prior to the trip – I didn’t do much research before coming here. The canal cruise also served as a tour, and while we floated down the waterways, we learned about the history of Amsterdam and the people living here. I grabbed a window seat and enjoyed the cool breeze… until it became too cold!
While on the boat, the guide spoke about a shopping district called the Nine Streets, or De Negen Straatjes. They 
were described as housing unique shops, so obviously I was very intrigued and wanted to go there! Since the tentative plan was to eventually make our way to the Anne Frank Museum, I thought it would be a perfect excursion, as walking the nine streets would eventually lead us to the museum. Before we started on our shopping journey, I had my first taste of Indonesian food, and I thought it was delicious, though a bit spicy! It didn’t taste much different than the microwavable pad thai that I can get at home, but the fried noodles and chicken sate was delectable. I think the cruise guide hyped the shops up a bit much! There weren’t many shops open, to begin with, since it was Sunday and starting to get late. There were multiple vintage or thrift shops, however, in which I definitely had a lot of fun. I haven’t done enough searching, but I think the thrift stores here are a lot cooler than back home! They had lines and lines of vintage belts and purses, very much like the ones that my grandma has stored in her closets and drawers saved from the generation above her.
The nine streets were organized in rows of three, each separated by a canal. We zig-zagged back and forth in order to see every store! Finally, when we reached the end and walked up to the Anne Frank Museum, we were bombarded with an immense line like I’ve never seen before. Our 
feet were tired by then, so we agreed we’d come back to visit the museum another morning – just like the Van Gogh Museum we tried earlier. The museum was adjacent to the Homomonument, a monument for the LGBT community in commemoration of all that have been persecuted because of their sexuality. I thought it would be fitting to take a picture with it because I am currently taking a class on Sexual Difference in Art History, and in our introduction lecture, an image of the Homomonument popped up.
We decided to walk back to the hotel, even though we still had our free tram passes. Though we were all tired, we slowly walked through the shopping district on Kalverstraat (straat = street). Before getting to this shopping area, though, I was given a rude awakening when it comes to being aware of my surroundings. I was buried in my map, making sure we were making the right turns in the right places. We were walking in a plaza across from Dam Square. All of a sudden, the map was ripped from my hands by a rowdy guy, probably about my age, who then proceeded to make cheering noises and throw the map to the ground (this latter fact, though, was told to me by my sister who was able to see the event take place from an outsider’s perspective). It was actually quite a frightening experience, and I didn’t want to address the culprits in any way, shape, or form, and it is for that reason that I continued to walk as if nothing had happened, leaving the map to blow away in the wind behind me. Beware of the rowdy, drunk, and most probably high, boys in Amsterdam!
The plan wasn’t to return to our hotel at 7:00 at night and pass out, but fall asleep we did – at least my sister and I did. I’m pretty sure my mom remained awake and wrote in her travel journal. I don’t think I woke up until close to 9:30, and only then did we venture out again for some grub. I had a quick bite to eat at a pizza place, and then we went to a dessert shop where Malka ate some ice-cream and my mom had an amazing (I repeat, AMAZING) Nutella covered waffle! Even with the long nap, though, I had no problem falling right back to sleep upon our return.
